Benchmarking Whisper for Low-Resource Speech Recognition: An N-Shot Evaluation on Pashto, Punjabi, and Urdu

Najm Ul Sehar, Ayesha Khalid, Farah Adeeba, Sarmad Hussain

Abstract: Whisper, a large-scale multilingual model, has demonstrated strong performance in speech recognition benchmarks, but its effectiveness on low-resource languages remains under-explored. This paper evaluates Whisper’s performance on Pashto, Punjabi, and Urdu, three underrepresented languages. While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has advanced for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages still face challenges due to limited data. Whisper’s zero-shot performance was benchmarked and then its small variant was fine-tuned to improve transcription accuracy. Significant reductions in Word Error Rate (WER) were achieved through few-shot fine-tuning, which helped the model better handle challenges such as complex phonetic structures, compared to zero-shot performance. This study contributes to improving multilingual ASR for low-resource languages and highlights Whisper’s adaptability and potential for further enhancement.